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Nothing to Work For

Richard Vedder has an op-ed in the WSJ today discussing the costs to American productivity that having fewer people working is having. The cost is substantial: According to Vedder, whereas from the 17th century through the 20th American wealth averaged a robust 3.5% annual growth, during the first twelve years of the 21st century it has averaged only 1.8%.

Vedder lists several causes for the slowdown, including primarily increasing government benefits. More and more people are availing themselves of payments from the government for food, for being unemployed, for disabilities, for going to college. All of these things either lure people out of the workforce or subsidize them for staying out of it. That means fewer people engaging in productive labor, which means slowing wealth production.

There are any number of thresholds a civilization might cross before it reaches the point of no return, but if the European experience for the last several decades is an indicator, having nothing to work for is a big one. And that is what these programs amount to: a slow but inexorable removal of all the reasons one might have to work.

Imagine you were an average young person in America today, coming out of, let’s say, high school. What do you see before you? A lot of pointlessness. Consider: So far in your short life you have enjoyed an enormously, indeed historically unprecedentedly, high standard of living. You have hours and hours per day of leisure time (that includes many of the hours you spend “studying” in school). What did you do to earn or deserve this? Nothing—you showed up. And if you ask for anything, you’ll probably get it.

Consider also that the dominant theme in American politics recently has been that there is something wrong or suspicious about earning money. If the rich need to pay their fair share, it means that either they haven’t done so already or they need to make reparations for something they did that was wrong. And many young people think that one becomes rich not by producing benefits or services that improve other people’s lives but by cheating somehow. So rich people don’t deserve what they have. (Of course, our system of quasi-capitalism, which increasingly rewards people on political rather than on economic grounds, increasingly gives reason for such suspicions.)

And consider further that all the material comforts for which people in previous times would have had to work are now increasingly provided for one without any effort on one’s own part—food, shelter, education, and health care chief among them.

So: The game is rigged, you can’t keep most of what you earn, you can get paid for doing nothing, and many of the creature comforts of contemporary life are available to you whether you work for them or not.

William Graham Sumner’s famous 1883 essay “The Forgotten Man” claims that when politicians and reformers decide they need to help some downtrodden or underprivileged segment of the population, they inevitably do so by taking money from the honest, hardworking, pays-his-debts person who otherwise just wants to make a better life for himself and his family. This “forgotten man” often ends up being punished for his “bourgeois virtues.”

But another theme in Sumner’s essay is that as the programs to help the downtrodden expand, the more likely it is that this forgotten man—on whom these programs depend—will start to feel like a sucker. He will feel exploited, taken advantage of by an unholy alliance of do-gooders and free riders.

I think many young people today see their futures in America the way Sumner’s forgotten man would after some crucial thresholds have been passed. What point is there, really, in working hard? Working hard is, after all, hard. Is there really a reward in it that matters to me—that appeals to me viscerally? If we add into this person’s vision of the future the doomsday scenarios about our national debt, and how it is all going to come crashing down like a fiscal house of cards sometime soon anyway, what, really, would be the point?

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5 Responses

The question to ask is: What happens when the money runs out or worse yet when the money is worthless? What will happen to all the people on the government gravy train when there is no one left to pull the train? The American people,by and large, are traveling down the road to serfdom and don’t even realize it. The Western European and American trip to insolvency was planned that way by Elitists and Cultural Marxists in order to destroy the independent affluent and middle classes and,at the same time, set up a nation of dependency. Once this was accomplished it would be easy to control the “masses” and fold them into a New World order run by these same Elitists. The step by step implementation of the One World Government has been taking place for the last 100 plus years. It started during the early “progressive” years in the mid 19th Century and has accelerated ever since. Centralization of government,Public Education(indoctrination),Central Banking,Paper fiat currency, Income Taxes, the growth of the Welfare State,the numbering and cataloging of individual citizens,the restrictions and downplaying of Constitutional Rights plus a myriad of regulations and laws which gives the State absolute control over it’s individual citizens. Once the “fiscal house of cards” comes crashing down that is when people will see the end of whats left our Constitution,our Republic and our way of life. It will be a world of “let me see your papers” and Gulags.

This post is really all over the place. I really have no idea what you’re getting at. It seems like a vague straw man attack against the welfare state, as oppossed to getting at anything specific. Is it young people on welfare that bothers you? If so, that’s a minscule number. We spend 7-8 times more government dollars on old people than we do on the young.

Furthermore, as someone who had to suck it up in the dark days of the financial crisis when I got laid off, taking a full-time job in the $11 an hour range, while going in debt to get my Master’s in Finance, I find your line of logic incredibly insulting. I know plenty of people my age who are struggling and working their ass off for nothing, while old cranks like yourself sit back and take shots at us. (I assume you’re old, because only an old guy would view the young with such disdain and make such lazy arguments.)

So, while I do recognize the need to decrease the welfare state and control the growth of leviathan, I also am not going to sit back and let some guy like yourself make a mean-spirited, lazy, argument about how people in my generation are welfare queens. I mean, not once did you even make a decent attempt to cite any meaningful statistics. C’mon man. This blog is better than this post.

Boy, that’s sure a lot of heat for what I thought was a relatively innocuous, if perhaps dour, post—especially if you ‘had no idea what I was getting at.’ In any case, I think you misunderstood my point. The post was not an attack on the young. I was instead lamenting their position, and suggesting that incentives are increasingly making hard work seem like a sucker’s bet for them. Of course I was speaking in generalities, and of course there are exceptions. You, apparently, are an exception, as am I (as old as I am!). But the numbers of people who are exiting the workforce, staying out of it, or delaying entry into it (incidentally, the “meaningful statistics” were in the Vedder article I cited, and are widely available elsewhere) are increasing to worrisome levels. My point was that for many of these people, institutional incentives being what they are, one could hardly blame them.

But look at college enrollment. The lions share of declining labor force participation can be explained there. Retiring boomers also factor in.

I do not know which incentives you speak of. My unemployment was $300 a week in 2009 and took me 3 months to get, because the state was so overwhelmed and prioritizing claims. It was literally the worst experience in my 32 years of life and so dehumanizing. I have friends who fared worse and are still in underemployment hell. The recession kicked the crap out of my generation, much more than it did yours. I just don’t know what these incentives you speak of are. Maybe in a world populated by Masochists, because you’d have to be to desire that type of life. There is no welfare gravy train for the young.

On the other hand, I have a great aunt whose 100, never worked a day in her life, and worth well north of a million dollars receiving around $1700 a month in Social Security with all her health care paid by Medicare and Tri-care. Seems like maybe that should concern you more.

Shaun, you still haven’t understood the point of my post. I am not attacking young people. I am arguing that they are responding rationally to (perverse) incentives. My attack is on the incentives, which are increasingly leading people (again, rationally) into behaviors that I believe are not good ones. If I were instead simply trying to figure out who are the biggest beneficiaries of government benefits, then you would be right that I should certainly have a look at the retiring boomers. But that was not my aim. My claim was instead that all those benefits we are paying to boomers (and others) are extremely expensive, which doubly disincentivizes younger working people from continuing to do the hard work necessary to sustain them.

(And by the way, I’m 44 years old. If you’re 32, I’m sorry to tell you that that means you and I are of basically the same generation. If you were 22, then all that hey-old-man stuff might be understandable. But you’re not.)

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